Time for a new round of White House thuggery

U-T San Diego Editorial Board

Childishness and thuggishness don’t usually go together. But with this year’s Obama administration’s budget hardball, it’s the norm.

This spring, after being forced to make small cuts in overall federal spending because of the budget sequester deal, the White House chose to do so in a way that created nightmares for hundreds of thousands of people, ordering unnecessary furloughs of air traffic controllers to force flight delays. Internal emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal noted that “the FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is.”

Now we are seeing hundreds of fresh examples of the Obama administration punishing the public to ramp up pressure on House Republicans in the fight over federal spending, which has led to a partial government shutdown the past week.

Locally, it was the appalling eleventh-hour decision — nominally by the Pentagon — to cancel the moneymaking Miramar Air Show last week. In South Dakota, it was the pathetic decision — nominally by the National Park Service — to place cones on the side of an adjacent road to block off viewing areas of the closed Mount Rushmore national monument. In cyberspace, it was the jaw-dropping (and since-reversed) decision to close the federal Amber Alert website while leaving up first lady Michelle Obama’s exercise site.

This parade of petulance looks all the more ridiculous when one understands that the furlough of federal employees is not what it seems. Congress is moving to pay workers for days not worked. Just because this has been done in past shutdowns doesn’t mean it makes sense.

And for all the coverage of the budget fight, there has been little attention paid to the ominous big picture. Nearly $6 trillion has been added to the national debt since 2009, a period in which nearly one-third of all federal spending used borrowed money. This in turn balloons the interest we must pay on the debt. Between mandatory interest payments and the influx of millions of baby boomers into Social Security and Medicare, the U.S. is only a decade away from having mandatory spending eat up three-quarters of the federal budget.

We must break our march toward being a superpower version of Greece. But instead of working to change course, the president and his Chicago-schooled operatives focus on how to hurt Americans for the sin of electing fiscal conservatives to the House — people who are right to worry about our never-ending cycle of borrowing and spending.